“...the infrastructure required sophisticated engineering solutions to transport up to 80 million cubic meters of desalinated water annually.”
A mere 2300 years after the Romans figured it out.
there’s just GOT to be Chinese fingerprints on this great engineering accomplishment, both financing and engineering, but i can’t find it ...
The cheapest desalination is done by Israel and Singapore at about $500@acre foot.
Lower that cost to $200@acre foot and it become profitable to farm any desert on earth with everything but field crops.
A reduction in desalination costs of roughly $ 300 per acre-foot is all it takes to double the size of habitable Earth.
Will that happen?
The best minds on the planet are currently laboring elsewhere. This years grok 4 is smarter than all phds in all fields. Musk said the models coming out next year will be good enough to create new physics.
So they’ll likely be able to produce cheaper desalination plants if some nimble minds take up the problem of how to make desalination cheaper.
The ticket would probably to make sure the new desalination plant could work independently or in concert, fit on the back of either a flatbed truck or a spaceship, and work on both earth and mars.